[T-961] How about non-spaced repetition?

Dear Rine,

I’m emerging back into daily life after an extended Easter weekend. My wife and son went to visit my inlaws in the countryside west of Belgrade on Sunday. On Monday evening I cycled 62 km to join them, and then on Tuesday noon I rode back home, taking a detour over some nasty hills, extending the route to 77 km.

That’s about six and a half hours of total time in the saddle. Not forgetting my 1000 days of Japanese commitment, I used the opportunity to do some non-spaced mental reviews to great effect. I mastered a bit of tricky vocab that so far eluded me.

I’m particularly happy with the results because combining physical and mental workouts is not something I typically excel at.

You see, I’m not like @Alexis_Incogito who can generate useful ideas while riding his bicycle. In my case, when riding, my mind seems to leak from my head and drain down into the balls of my feet where they connect to the pedals. There it spins in circles like a cat in a washing machine, which makes it impossible for me to keep a chain of thought together for long enough to constitute actual thinking.

The best I can do is whistle theme music from either Superman, Indiana Jones or Star Wars.

In fact, let me illustrate to you just how dumb I am when cycling, as experienced by a well-meaning gas station clerk a few seasons ago.

Of course, riding my bike, all the fuel I need is water and the carbon hydrates in a handful of chocolate bars. But when I ride on open roads, I often buy my refuel candy at gas stations.

I don’t know how it is in Germany, but here in Serbia gas stations are mostly self-service. You park your vehicle next to a pump and fill your tank on your own. Then you go inside, buy some knick-knacks on your way to the cash register, and once there, tell the clerk that your car is at, say, pump number 6. The clerk can then see on his screen how much fuel you pumped from pump number 6 and charge you accordingly.

On this particular occasion, when I unloaded my chocolate bars at the cash register, the clerk decided to make a joke. Seeing me fully kitted in spandex, with a helmet and eyeglasses still on my head, he asked me, grinning, for the pump number so he could charge me for the gasoline. His joke went completely over my head. I just told him matter-of-factly, with a straight face, that I didn’t pump any gas and that I just wanted the water and the chocolates.

Yes, beneath that helmet, even if I’m only slightly dehydrated and glycogen-depleted, it’s pretty much lights out.

And so when I rode this Monday, I realized that this might be an excellent opportunity to do a mental subset review of a some items from my N5 deck that were giving me some trouble in the last few days: the ordinal numbers for days of the month.

You know: 1日、二日、三日，四日、五日… and so on all the way to 10 (after which they take on a predictable pattern). I kept messing them up and confusing them with each other.

So I thought if I can practice for long enough to nail them down while out riding, they will stop troubling me. And it would be a great use of time, relative to whistling the Indiana Jones theme on repeat.

The challenge I gave myself is to time my counting with my pedal strokes, which hover at a cadence of about 90 rpm.

I can tell you, for the first few kilometers while I tried to drill the numbers, my head was hurting, wanting to burst out of the vents of my helmet. My brain was, or so I imagined, burning more glucose than my quads. I was unable to count to three without stumbling and stuttering.

But I tried and tried and tried. It felt like I was clearing a neural pathway through a thicket, going back and forth, clearing more of the undergrowth with each pass.

After about an hour I mastered the first four digits. Then I practiced from the fourth to the eight. And then I tried chaining them all together.

And indeed, I can tell you, by the time I turned off from the main road for the last 10 km, the tricky ordinals became completely automatic and trivial. The next day, on my way back, I did a few more drills to verify, and indeed it was still easy.

Now, SuperMemo can take over the long-term maintenance of this newly cleared neural pathway, to prevent the creeping undergrowth of forgetfulness to take over again. I ran into a few of those items today and yesterday and I was able to answer them quickly, with no confusion or hesitation.

Whether this newly-acquired ease is a short-term effect or a permanent gain (as long as its augmented with SRS reviews) remains to be seen.

But assuming its long-term, does this mean I am now a proponent of cramming?

Not quite, but maybe a little.

Among cyclists, there’s this concept of junk miles. These are all the miles you ride that don’t contribute to your fitness. When you ride around without any plan or purpose, noodling around, neither slow enough for aerobic adaptations nor fast enough for anaerobic capacity gains, we call those junk miles.

Well, I think that most people, me included, accumulate a lot of mental junk miles throughout the day. That’s all the time we spend spinning trivial thoughts in your brain… looping over the same set of vague worries… thinking about money and bills or entertaining some other base instincts. There’s perhaps an opportunity to replace those mental junk miles with something more constructive. And if there are no other opportunities presently available, drilling tricky vocab may be a good choice, perhaps?

I’ll resume my daily reports starting tomorrow.